Space Cowboy

David Bowie's son aims high and proves his pedigree with a new feature film

Science fiction has been good to the Bowie family. The infectious melancholy of "Space Oddity" gave David Bowie his first hit, and Ziggy Stardust was his first great stage persona. Now David's son, a director of commercials who discarded his famous-baby moniker Zowie Bowie for the anonymity of his real first and last names, Duncan Jones, has made his feature debut with the suspenseful, poignant sci-fi indie Moon. A chillingly clever homage to Stanley Kubrick's 2001, the movie stars Sam Rockwell as a space worker whose only companion on his three-year lunar assignment is a computer named Gerty, voiced by Kevin Spacey. Harvesting energy for Earth and longing for his family, he's as lonely as Bowie's Major Tom. "My dad has had a huge influence on me," Jones, 38, says cheerfully from London. "He's the smartest man I know."

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His father introduced him to Philip K. Dick and George Orwell, whose near-future dystopias foreshadow the shocking one revealed in Moon. Still, Jones' philosophy degree underpins the movie's fascinating ethical issues. And he learned about sudden shocks at Gordonstoun, the severe Scottish boarding school where royal sons toughen up. "I'd been in a perfectly normal school in Switzerland, where we lived on and off since I was young," he says. "In Scotland I was a wreck; I'd lost my friends and any sense of home. I slept through my exams, spent time drinking, and was asked to leave." A stint at Jim Henson's Creature Shop rekindled his love of film, and a return to Switzerland to counsel kids with learning disabilities brought perspective. "I'm the sum of my experience," Jones says. "I was trying to figure out where I fit in." The obvious answer? Behind a movie camera.—